Welcome Back, and a Beginning of the Year Writing Assignment

Well, I know it's been a while, but I've decided to restart this blog as a way to chronicle my first year of teaching English at Milford High School in Cincinnati, OH.  I will be posting lesson plan ideas, things that I have discovered (or am in the process of discovering), and just general discussions about myself and my professional practices as an English teacher in the 21st century.

My first thought this morning, as I was pondering lesson plan ideas for the beginning of the year, was how to incorporate a "Get to know you" paper into the beginning of the year.  As a department, our 10th graders all read the brilliant Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time by Mark Haddon, and so our first week or so is going to be spent with that novel and getting the students back into the swing of school after three months off.  But next, we're moving on to Lord of the Flies and some character analysis of the novel.  The prompt for the essay on LotF is something akin to the following:

(Your character) shows (character trait) when he/she (three examples
from LOTF). 

Ex. from Lord of the Flies: Ralph shows the other boys how to be
civilized when he creates rules for the boys, stands up against Jack and takes
responsibility for the boys’ actions when they are rescued.

So my thought for the first writing assignment of the year is to have them answer this prompt, but write about THEMSELVES in the third person.  So the prompt will look like this:

(Your name) shows (character trait) when he/she (three examples from your life).

Ex:  Joey shows that he is generous when he volunteers his time at the food bank, helps his younger sister with her homework and takes his best friend to school every morning.

The paper will be relatively short, probably a page or so, and I will take them through the writing process as we go.  So day one will be an introduction to the paper, some prewriting, and possibly starting the rough draft.  Day two will be a rough draft day, day three will peer editing (with some scaffolding and structure) and then day four will be writing the second draft and turning it in either at the end of class or at the beginning of the following day.  I will have them turn in all of their drafts and the peer editing letter, and that will help me assess if there are any overriding issues that we need to address as a class.

I think this will be a good introduction to my process and the process that they will expect to follow throughout the year with their writing, and it will also give me a chance to have a formative writing assessment and get to know the students at the same time.  I'll have to check with my Common Core standards to see which this lesson addresses, but I'm sure it will hit more than a few.

I'll probably post links to the assignment sheets when I get them finished.

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First lesson plan of the year

It's just a draft at this time, and I don't really have much time right now to wax philosophical about it, but here is a draft of a teaching demonstration lesson for my English 297 class, Teaching of Writing.  The lesson is about capitalization.  The basic plan is to start class working in pairs correcting the capitalization of an ee cummings poem.  From there, we will come back as a whole class to go through the various rules of capitalization with the use of skeletal notes to be filled in with examples offered up by the class as a whole.  To finish up, the class will form 5 groups of 4 and correct the capitalization in a Don Marquis poem, "The Coming of Archy".  As a sponge, there will also be a short passage of my own creation with as many capitalization errors as I can fit!

Please let me know what you think:


Read more »

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Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more...

King Henry said it well, and so I'll repeat it as I begin my home stretch on my journey to getting my certification. This fall semester I'm taking four classes to finish up my English content for my certification, Rhetoric and Theory, Teaching Writing, Teaching Literature, and Young Adult Literature.  I'm excited about all of my classes and I'm looking forward to learning the nuts and bolts of teaching lit and writing.  I got the reading list for my YA lit course at the beginning of August, so I've been getting a head start on the reading for that class.  So far I've read "Catcher in the Rye", "House on Mango Street", "The Chocolate War" and I'm finishing up, "A Wizard of Earth's Sea".  All of the books have been great, and it's been really interesting to read them with an eye toward teachable moments.  That's especially true of "A Wizard of Earth's Sea," which is a fantasy novel complete with wizards and a dragons.  You see, my favorite genre of all has got to be fantasy, but I generally read it for pure escapism, with little regard to the theme or symbol, so as I'm reading LeGuin's novel, I'm paying particular attention to the possible themes and symbols in the tale.  It's quite interesting.

I also got my assignment for student teaching.  I'll be teaching at Bloomington High School starting January 31, 2011, which is great seeing as how it is mere blocks away from my house.  I actually observed the teacher I'll be working with back in February and was very impressed with his creative writing class and his incorporation of The Beatles into his instruction.  I'm really looking forward to working with him for my student teaching experience.

I will try to keep this space updated as often as I'm able, I am, however, working close to 40 hours and taking 12 hours of class, so we'll see how it goes.

Wish me luck!

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Web 2.0 in the Classroom

We had a spirited (though short) discussion about Web 2.0 in the classroom this morning in my C&I Class.  This was a fortuitous occurrence given the blog post I read last night on Mr. B-G's English blog about just this.  In our discussion, one of my peers was explaining the benefits and usefulness of something like Twitter to get students engaged in the classroom and it's potential uses for things like attendance, discussions, and formative assessments.  In his post, Mr. B-G discusses how "Antiquated High School" has a negative view of technology and sees things like iPhones as enemies of the educational process.  I'm conflicted as to how I feel about these ideas.  As a technology-savvy 28 year old, I feel that I am well-equipped to use new and emerging technologies to help my students in class.  But I'm also concerned about shoehorning technology where it doesn't belong, just so we can congratulate ourselves on how forward-thinking we are.

There very well may be useful applications of Twitter in the classroom, but I haven't heard of any.  Thoughts?  Please, by all means leave comments.  Now, don't get the impression that I am a technophobe who is afraid of the 140 character format.  I have a Twitter account, I was active for about 9 months, but then it lost it's luster.  I failed to see the long term appeal of the format and so I jumped off the micro-blogging bandwagon.  And I wasn't just a casual user.  I was uploading photos and tweets from our vacation in Boston, I had a 3rd party twitter client on my computer, and I was following over 100 people and had over 100 followers myself.  I saw how it could be a cool gadget, but in a life already overloaded with stuff to check and websites to visit, I felt that Twitter was just one more thing vying for my attention.  I didn't have time, and it had outlasted it's utility.  My personal experience has certainly colored my opinion of twitter as a classroom tool and a platform, but I think I can see how the short format and ease of use can appeal to students.

In class, we also briefly touched on the privacy concerns and the lack of access that some students will certainly face as we integrate technology more and more into our curriculum.  Mr. B-G addresses this with his plea for the state and federal government to realign their values to focus on the access to technology that all of our students need to compete on the world stage:

This cannot happen unless the federal and state governments renew their commitment to education, moving away from drill-and-kill instruction and toward constructivist, open classroom environments where teachers facilitate learning though technology, collaboration, and exploration. The days of the teacher as the “sage on the stage” are gone. Our new roles are to serve as guides through an increasingly complex and ever changing digital maze of information.

We can’t lead our charges into this new horizon with the tools of the previous century. To remain relevant, school districts must acquire the digital hardware of today’s workplace, train teachers on its use in the classroom, and then give students the freedom to explore, experiment, and harness their skills as navigators, evaluators, and creators of tomorrow’s world.

I think he's definitely on the right track.  We can't assign work to students if they don't have access to the resources necessary to complete it.  I think one stop-gap measure that I'll have to take is that of offering alternative assignments to those students who either don't have access to certain resources or whose parent's (or the students themselves) have a problem with them participating in something like social networking.

Hopefully, as we move further into the 21st century, more schools will take the pro-active approach like UHigh, Illinois State's lab school, and provide netbooks to all of the students.  This way, they know that all students have access to the technology they need (whether they use it or not is another post entirely!).  But this costs money, and luckily for our students, netbooks are getting cheaper and cheaper, and soon having a computer won't be a "hopefully", it will be a given.

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Blogs, Wikis and Nings, Oh My!

This was a productive weekend.  On Friday afternoon, I browsed through several English teaching blogs, adding several to my Google Reader (Mr. B-G's English Blog, Edumacation, and the Cool Cat Teacher Blog).  Then on Saturday night, I discovered the Making Curriculum Pop Ning and I started exploring the English Companion Ning.  All of these resources put my mind at ease as I am tasked with preparing my three lesson micro-teaching unit and my first unit for UHigh.  I was just DUMBFOUNDED by the sheer amount of awesome ideas I came across in just my cursory browsing.  It's great to know that I don't have to reinvent the wheel when it comes to teaching stuff like The Great Gatsby or Brave New World.  And when I do come up with some awesome unit or some great way to relate a subject to my students, I can't wait to share it with the community.

 

I'm grateful that I'm beginning my teaching career in this age of technology, and I'm also grateful that teachers are still figuring out cool new ways to use it.  When I join in the discourse, even though I'll be a novice teacher, I'll be on a similar playing field as the others as far as this emerging technology is concerned.

 

It was also really cool to see some of the literacy strategies we've spoken of in class being used in the "real world".  Especially on MC Pop, there were entire discussion threads devoted to multiple modes of perception (UDL) and ways of making content relevant to students.

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Literacy Presentation and Lesson Plan

Okay, so I may not be getting any students to let forth a barbaric yawp just yet, but I presented my lesson on Wednesday and I think it went well.  I'm not exactly Robin Williams, but I think I can get there.  For my presentation, I utilized the literacy strategy of Text Impression.  With this pre-reading strategy, you give the class a list of vocabulary words that you have gleaned from the upcoming reading (enough to give them a hint as to the content, without giving anything away), then ask them to craft a short descriptive passage about what they think you'll be covering.  Once finished, you share several responses and then start the reading.  The goal of the strategy is to generate interest and begin creating a greater sense of engagement with the text.  As the students start the reading, they will keep the short passages in mind, constantly comparing their own guess with the actual text.

As mentioned, I think my presentation went well, despite a small hiccup with the order of things.  However, I ran into a small problem by trying to have the students work on two lists and two descriptive passages at the same time.  We were covering two separate texts, but I gave them both lists at the same time...this was a mistake.  Even my college student classmates had trouble following what was expected of them with this strategy.  When I repeat this lesson in the future, if I choose to cover two texts in one go, I will definitely split the lists up.

Literacy Strategy Lesson Plan
Literacy Strategy Concept Map
Literacy Strategy Presentation
John Henry Handout

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Book Talk: 1984

I know I wanted to post my Lesson Plan tonight, but I had to spend my time on other projects this evening.  Here is the Book Talk I prepared for George Orwell's novel, "1984"

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Thoughts on my first lesson plan

These things are HARD!

I am currently working on my first ever lesson plan for the aforementioned C&I class, and it is way more difficult than I initially anticipated.  The main problem for me, I think, is the goal of the lesson.  I have an idea about the texts I want to use and connections I want to make, but now I am struggling with the actual goals I want the students to accomplish at the end of the lesson.  I wish I had known about Backwards Planning before I came up with my idea for the texts I wanted to use.

It is interesting, however, to think about the evolution of my idea even over the course of two or three days.  The initial impetus for my lesson was the article I found, Songs That Teach: Using Song-Poems to Teach Critically, by James R. Carlson, wherein he speaks of using Bob Dylan songs (among others) as alternate texts with which to aid the students in meaning-making.  While I don't have the time in the scope of this particular assignment to utilize the songs in the same way that Carlson does, I did appreciate the concept of using songs (and accompanying lyrics) as a way of engaging the students by providing them with an alternate view of text.  In the article, Carlson used Dylan's, "The Death of Emmett Till," to further the discussion of two books that his students had read.  He further tied it into the concept of artistic/stylistic choice and the fallibility of sources. 

This is an incredible amount of information and I feel that I can absolutely do that sort of thing...when I have an entire year to work with.  One of the problems I am confronting is scaling back my idea.  At the beginning, I was planning on using "John Henry" by Johnny Cash and wanted to tie that into the Monomyth and how it relates to American Folklore and our folk heroes as extensions of the Classic heroes.  Oh, and I wanted to extend it to the connections of various versions of the same song and how our ideas and stories change and evolve over time...all in a 15 minute presentation.  I guess I can't be blamed for being unambitious!

I have since scaled back to using, "John Henry" as an introduction and alternate text relating to Man vs. Machine, and tying that in with an excerpt from an as yet to be determined short story by Isaac Asimov in I, Robot.  The connection will hopefully be Man vs Machine and Man vs Technology and how two authors in two mediums can approach the same theme, but with very different results, very different texts, and very different viewpoints.  This could also tie into a broader lesson arc of the continuing struggle of Man vs. Machine across the ages of literature (every advance in technology has detractors and proponents, and every advance is heralding the downfall of society etc etc).

See.  Even when I scale it back, I run into the problem of all of these ideas floating in my head to connect this to this to that, and nowhere is there a state standard in sight.  I've even decided on the fact that I want to do a prereading exercise, but again, without a standard or goal to shoot for, there's no way to choose a strategy.

I'll check back in tomorrow night, and by then I'll definitely have a lesson plan to share.  I promise.

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An Introduction

Hello and welcome to my Teaching Blog.  This blog was started as part of an assignment for C&I 214 at Illinois State, but I plan on maintaining it throughout the rest of my certification and hopefully throughout my career as an educator.

First off, my name is Harry Smith and I am from central Ohio.  I was born in Columbus, grew up in London, and graduated Cum Laude from The Ohio State University with a BA in English, with a focus in Creative Writing.  I moved to Normal, IL in 2008 with my wife Emily Smith while she pursued her MFA in Sculpture at ISU.  After working from home for 8 months or so, I decided to explore substitute teaching and possibly a return to school.  I had a fantastic time working with the kids as a substitute teacher, and took the plunge to go back to school the following fall.  In August of 2009, I started classes at Heartland Community College at the behest of my advisor.  And in January, 2010, I began the Secondary Ed certification program at Illinois State.  It is a decision that has never felt more right.

I haven't always wanted to be an English Teacher.  Whenever anyone would find out that I was an English major at OSU, their first question would inevitably be, "Oh, are you going to be a teacher?"  My inevitable response would be an emphatic "No!"  I could never be a teacher.  I didn't have the patience, I didn't like kids, I didn't KNOW enough.  Never.

Eight months waiting tables, six months managing a hotel and three years at a foreclosure law firm later, and I feel that I am finally ready to begin shaping minds.

So here we are, I am about halfway through my teaching certification and this time next year I will be trying to find gainful employment as a high school English teacher in Cincinnati, OH.  In the meantime, I will be posting periodically to this space, lesson plans, ideas, concepts, philosophy and questions.  Welcome to my small corner of the internet and please, make yourself at home.

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